Things have been so exciting working @gravity this year and I am amazed at how much we have accomplished in the last few months. All of this excitement and hard work has worn my not-twenty-something body out just a tad and my family has become quite used to my MacBook on my lap during weekend afternoons.

So…. How nice it is that we all get a 3-day weekend to relax and spend some quality time with those people (and/or cats) in our lives that do not work at Gravity? I have also been able to work on this blog once again. After a nice day out with the family on this beautiful spring day, I found myself curious about what I needed to do next… NOTHING!

How great is that? I was really dumbfounded for a while until my brain chimed in with a wonderful suggestion: Relax! Well that is just what I am doing right now.

Here’s to having a moment to relax and accepting it! Hope you get a moment or to yourself.

I just gained access to Google’s Music Beta and for the first time, I think my personal music library may be smaller than the amout of cloud storage available for free!

It is truly amazing just how far we have come from the the early days of cramming mp3’s into a JPEG image to store on a free image hosting site back in the 90’s. Napster not only broadened what was possible for music online, but also inadvertently set us all back a decade of fighting to truly OWN the music we legally purchase from the big music labels.

Yes, I know there are a lot of you that have second thoughts about giving so much to the Google Collective, and I have no beef with you and your own convictions.

This was not an easy task! For one thing, my Community Server (CS) site was not functional, so using RSS / MetaWeblog endpoints were not available options for me. Secondly, I no longer have a Windows development machine. Since CS is built on all Microsoft technologies, I needed to fire up a virtual instance of Windows in order to extract any of the data. If my previous hosting service was able to keep my database online for longer than minutes at a time, I could have run things remotely, but… not the case.

But if you look closely at it, you’ll see that there are to scalar functions in there: ‘dbo.old_url‘ & ‘dbo.make_slug‘. I was surprised to findnot find any slugs in the CS DB tables. I assume that all of that logic is being handled from the compiled ASP.NET application itself because there was nothing in the tables, stored procedures, or even functions that did anything related to calculating/parsing URL slugs from post titles. To make matters worse, since my site was not in a running state (due to hosting shenanigans), I had basically just my memory along with the 404 logs on the new WordPress site to help me reverse engineer the rules for converting titles to slugs. This is best represented in my ‘dbo.make_slug’ snippet below:

There are still two more functions remaining (if you have been paying attention) that are used by ‘dbo.make_slug‘ and that is where the real fun comes in. First of these is the simpler ‘dbo.deDupeSpaces‘ which cuts all repeating space characters down to a single space:

So all of this so far is just to get my posts out of the CS DB in a format close enough to what I’ll need to stuff into my WordPress DB. In order to continue, I just ran the simple query (snippet at the top) and exported the results to an XML file. Now I could finally shutdown the virtual instance of Windows 7 that was eating up my MacBook’s resources and burning my lap from the CPU pegging. 😉

The rest is pretty straight forward. I was unable to find any WordPress Plugins so to assist me in this completely custom hackery, so I thought a brute force insert directly into my WordPress mySQL DB was a great idea. I first imported the XML file into a new table that I called cs_posts. This table’s structure is identical to the original query used to export it. Once this was done, I built a basic INSERT INTO … SELECT query to import these CS posts directly into my WordPress posts table:

From this point, all that was required was for me to correct any permalinks that did not match up to the slug I had calculated. But I also wanted to get 301 redirects in place for all incoming requests looking for /archive/YYYY/MM/DD/some-post-title-slug.aspx to find their way to the new URL /YYYY/MM/some-post-title-slug. This was much easier than I anticipated due to the luxury of John Godley‘s Redirection plugin. This gem of a plugin makes my introduction to the WordPress ecosystem a dream come true. In fact, after I set it up on both this site and my root: robnrob.com site, I was able to populate the redirection item table his plugin uses to skip the need to enter in each post’s specific redirection. The plugin also has an option for regex-ish pattern matching, but a lot of the permalinks I ended up with on WordPress would not directly transpose from the basic:

In the end, I lost out on previous comments, categories, and tags, but what I gained was a much more reliable hosting environment and a much more enjoyable platform to hack on. Also, to be honest, I had only a handful of comments anyway. 😉

Scala, TechnologyComments Off on The Most Exciting Email In My Nerd History

May192011

This is the first time that the creator of my programming language of choice sends me an email.

Scala 2.9 was just released this week and the development team at Gravity are working to migrate our code base onto it. Just after our first attempt to run our unit tests, we hit a bug that we could not code around and hit the forums for answers. I found an already reported bug that matched our case as well and jumped on the ticket to receive updates. Later that day I saw a comment on it from Martin Odersky (the original author of Scala) himself. That was exciting enough for me, but the email…. WOW.

Well… I got sick of not being able to get my CommunityServer blog to do what I wanted, so I bit the bullet and went WordPress.

For now, all of my previous robnrob.com posts are tucked away in a MSSQL database hidden away from the world. Once I can get the data ported over to this WordPress instance, I will most definitely do it.